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| continues = 340, 341 | | continues = 340, 341 | ||
| author =Podmore, F. (oxon) | | author =Podmore, F. (oxon) | ||
| title =A Voice from Laodicea | | title =A Voice from Laodicea* | ||
| subtitle = | | subtitle = | ||
| untitled = | | untitled = | ||
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}} | }} | ||
. | <center>(''continued'').</center> | ||
{{Style S-HPB SB. Continues on|10-340}} | <center>{{Style S-Small capitals|By f. podmore, b.a. (oxon.), f.c.s.}}</center> | ||
Again to revert to my illustration, the blow which I received may have been inflicted by the stick of a careless passer-by, or a hundred other known agencies. Yet, I believe it to have been the hansom cab, only because, in balancing the probabilities on a matter of such trifling importance, I am content with a very small surplus on the one side or the other. | |||
But the importance of the subject of Spiritualism will only in a very small measure explain my scepticism. I may refuse to believe the first tidings of some great calamity, or some sudden good fortune. But scepticism in such matters, we know well, endures for hours, not years. Clearly then, neither the momentous issues involved, nor the introduction of a previously unknown agent, are adequate of themselves to explain this state of mind. | |||
<center>{{Style S-Small capitals|the border-land between fact and myth.}}</center> | |||
To take another instance. Some seven years ago there appeared in ''The Zoologist'' a paragraph, copied, I think, from some American paper, relating how a traveller had found, in a remote district of Siberia, a country with a fairly temperate climate; that this traveller had ventured some distance into the country, and had there seen quietly feeding by the river-side, herds of the woolly rhinoceros, and the long-haired russet mammoth, and of other animals supposed by geologists to be extinct. I have heard nothing more of this discovery, so I imagine that it has still to be made. But, I have no doubt that many people who are better acquainted with the facts of palæontology than most American editors believed it at the time. Indeed, there is nothing absolutely improbable in it, for the entire carcases of both the animals mentioned have been found in the frozen soil of those regions; though we may think it unlikely that a few individuals, despite the rigours of the climate, and the scantiness of the food, should have survived to confound the geological sceptic. But, let us take yet another instance; suppose that some captain of a merchantman, of unquestioned integrity, should assert that in some remote tropical ocean he had seen and captured a monster, whose description should exactly tally with that of the long extinct Ichthyosaurus, a huge sea lizard, which lived in what is called the reptilian period of the earth’s history. Suppose, that neither he nor his crew having ever been inside a museum, or ever having read a book on geology, they should describe accurately the enormous narrow jaws of the monster, thick set with pointed teeth, the ring of large bony plates round the eyes, to protect them from the fury of the waves, the four paddles in the place of limbs, the fish-like body and nondescript tail,—the ''tout ensemble'', in short, of just such a creature as Mr. Waterhouse Hawkins has modelled at the Crystal Palace. Certainly no geologist would give credence to the story. He would urge how improbable, (he would most likely in the heat of his indignation against popular credulity, say impossible), it was that any air-breathing animal having survived so many revolutions of climate, the upheavings and engulfings of so many continents, and all the innumerable changes and chances which had destroyed the last of its kindred long ages ago, having left no trace through untold generations in the rock-sepulchres of all the earth, should be at last found alive in a world which had forgotten it, by a crew of unlettered seamen. On the other hand, the Ichthyosaurists would urge the integrity and the consentaneity of the witnesses; and the impossibility of so many points of likeness in their description being attributable to mere coincidence. They would maintain that the very ignorance of the observers was the strongest possible argument for the trustworthiness of their testimony. They would remind the sceptics that the remains of birds had long escaped detection, yet were now found in the oldest of the secondary rocks; and that here and there, in South American rivers or Australian seas, there are yet to be found fish with thick bony scales, huge fish-like reptiles, flat-teethed sharks, and other strange survivals from an earlier world. They would point out, that mariners in all ages had had traditions, and in our times detailed narratives of krakens, sea-serpents, and monstrous cuttlefish. They would find {{Style S-HPB SB. Continues on|10-340}} | |||
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